Kamui.co.uk

Finished work on the STGA pages

2008-05-09 16:16:19

The Scottish Tourist Guides Association (STGA) at the University of Edinburgh has had a makeover of its site which I was largely responsible for. The original concept design was done by our new Graphics Designer Stephen Hay but I had to alter and add to this design to make it fit the purpose of the site which was to make the information about the STGA more visible and appealing.

I have also had to rebuild a system which was used in the university but with the redevelopment of the university homepage became un-usable, this was a small application which read in the POST variables from a script and then emailed it after doing a few checks, while the script I made does perform most of the duties of the old script it does lack the ability to handle multiple fields with the same name, that addition will surely come in the next version. I was thinking about how I would implement it on this site eventually as it is quite useful even if it does lack the CAPTCHA features and hammering resistant features of the current version implemented on this site. To see the source code for the email application I have been building click here.

Just finished the OLL conference system admin

2008-04-18 18:11:37

For the past 2 months I have been building an administration system for the Office of lifelong learning's conferences that they run on a regular basis and just this afternoon I have successfully completed the administration system for the site.

This proved to be quite difficult as the requirements for the site included encryption which I had not deployed for a site before, reports in various formats collected from the database, as well as a plethora of different things the clients could be doing, submitting abstracts which can have multiple authors which need to be ordered, being a part of a discussion panel which can include multiple people presenting multiple abstracts.

Both text only and file versions of the abstracts needed to be uploaded securely predicting the use of incorrect mime types, i.e. really_scary_virus.exe being renamed to really_scary_virus.jpeg which the server if no protection was applied would interpret as a jpeg image, which while this would not work as images are not allowed other formats might have been, so the files had to be confirmed to be the correct file format which was complicated.

Some bonus features for future releases would be an easier templating system, as the current system is a bit clunky, which for it's use is not that much of a problem as it generally is not going to change style, only when a new conference comes along.

Though this may bore or go over the heads of most readers I am quite proud of what I have accomplished in such a relatively short time considering I am also working on many other projects for multiple departments, and especially proud that I could live up to my promise to the client that I would have it finished by the end of the week, even though it did require quite a few long nights in the last week slaving away to past 6pm.

Yay!

World�s first flying penguins

2008-04-02 9:17:45

Click to enlarge

A very cool April fools joke, documenting a unique breed of penguins that don't huddle up for winter, instead they fly a few thousand miles south to a tropical island to enjoy the tropical sun. Have a look while the video is still available.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/01/npenguin101.xml

Public debate on climate change

2008-03-27 16:30:50

Lesley Riddoch

A public debate on climate change will give people the chance to quiz experts on what can be done to help prevent global warming.

"Challenges of Climate Change", led by broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, will be held at the National Museum of Scotland Lecture Theatre on Thursday 10 April at 6pm.

The event will feature a panel of specialists from the University's School of GeoSciences and politicians from various parties.

The event, organised by the University, National Museums Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh will end at approximately 8pm.

Should be fun.

Movies

2008-03-12 1:54:51

While Heather has been away I have been watching all the movies in the cinema that she does not particularly like, namely horror movies, anything with Jack Black, and a couple of others just because.

Last week I went to see Jumper expecting to see quite a rubbish film, as I had been told by some of my friends, however I was pleasantly surprised, the movie was actually good well worth seeing while it is still in the cinema. I also went to see the untraceable, The concept of this movie interested me due to my interest in web design, and I was curious as to why the us government could not shut down a website, in the end it did make some level of sense, though not to ruin the plot there are ways of stopping this. It did have a few clever things within, some graphic violence, and very sick scenes in the same style as saw except without the logical puzzle to escape the trap.

A few days later I went to see Be Kind Rewind which was a typical Jack Black movie, a silly movie with a feel good chewy centre, and a good ending. Finally I went to see Rambo, I was interested to see how Sylvester Stallone would handle this film. I could see how a lot of the criticism of this film could have come about, in fact it was reaching the end of the movie and for a few moments I was wondering was that it, expecting something more to happen, then remembered the most interesting use for a claymore mine which was genuinely cool.

Other than this, I have not been up to much, went out for Hugo's leaving do at work, Hugo was our graphic designer in the web team, a stand up guy and it is a shame he left but the new guy Stephen seems to be fitting in well and Hugo's new job was paying him considerably more with less limitations which the university is infamous for.

Woo hoo!

2008-02-29 12:51:47

MSPs vote to scrap endowment fee

Students will no longer have to pay the graduate endowment fee when they finish university, after MSPs voted to abolish the charge.

Holyrood voted by 67 to 61 in favour of scrapping the one-off charge of £2,289.

The vote means current students and those who graduated last year will not have to pay the fee.

Brilliant News I am very happy, so is my bank account.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7268101.stm

Such a geek

2008-02-14 9:44:30

I was working today on fixing a bug in the paging system of one of the pages, which just turned out to be a miss-count in the maximum number of pages. However while debugging this I was also looking at the php.net website and noticed that a bug in the dl function had been fixed so as curiosity does I went and had a look to see what it did. To my delight it was a function I had been looking for, for a while, it loads a PHP extension at runtime rather than compiling it before which I do not have access to do on most of the servers. I like it when I find useful little functions like this.

Cloverfield

2008-02-12 10:33:13

Click to enlarge

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn . . . ah hem sorry about that had something caught in my throat. Went to see Cloverfield on Saturday and was thoroughly impressed, it is a homage to HP Lovecraft set in a Blair Witch low budget handy cam style which intensified the experience. What I liked was that it was mostly atmospheric unlike other horror movies which either go for the thing lurking in the dark or outright gore this is in the style of Aliens where the style is more towards action or atmosphere, yes people die but it is not as huge an issue as traditional horror movies. Found the page below when looking for images for Cloverfield very funny in a geeky way.

http://hijinksensue.com/.../project-cloverfield-top-secret-bath-gel/